Not every episode, but about once every other episode one of chefs will completely blow the judges away with one or more dishes.

On a few occasions, a contestant has managed to get past the appetizer round while completely forgetting to use one of the basket items. Can you imagine how good the food had to be to compensate for that?

In one case, a chef's dish was so good that the judges almost passed her to the next round despite her having only finished one out of four plates.

While she may have been chopped that episode, her dish was so good that she was invited to redeem herself on Chopped Redemption, faring much, much better than last time.

Yoanne Margis slips in the kitchen during the second round, spilling a pan full of boiling hot water over her legs, getting some pretty serious second degree burns. What does she do? She keeps going through not just the rest of the round, but all the way to the end, despite still being in pain. She even finished second in a very close match against Chef Lance of all people, who was so certain she did better than him, he promised her half the prize money to travel to see her sick grandmother in France.

On the third heat of the second Champions tournament, the contestants were given a tough basket, and one decides to risk making a cake. She just manages to get it done properly and plate it. After tasting it, judge Alex Guarnaschelli declares it might be the best dessert she's ever had on that show. Considering all the episodes she's been a judge in since the very first season, that's saying something.

Not only that, but the opponent opted to make churros dusted with cinnamon, cocoa powder, and instant coffee. And Alex Guarnachelli also declares that churro the best thing she ever tasted! For Alex to declare two desserts in the same round to be the best dessert she's ever had on Chopped, those two contestants had to have been really skilled.

Chef Natalia Machado, who won the episode she competed in (and made it to the dessert round in the first heat of the first Chopped Champions tournament), goes on to compete in the show Sweet Genius, which has a similar premise to Chopped, but it focuses entirely on desserts. She proceeds to win that one as well.

Chef Jessica Mogardo, known for having achieved victory despite being very nervous to the point of almost crying and throwing up, also competes and wins in Sweet Genius, making her and Chef Natalia the only two chefs who've competed and won in both shows.

Anne Burrell won her episode of All-Stars while being blinded in one eye from hot oil. The pain actually got worse as the match went on, and she kept working through it.

Jun Tanaka. In the entree round of the third heat of the Chopped Champions tournament, he was preparing frog legs (a required ingredient) when he trips and dropped most of the legs on the floor. He had enough spare frog legs to give a tasting portion to the judges. He recovered very nicely by making the best frog legs made on the show ever. It was so good that he basically made the other chefs look like amateurs compared to him. He singlehandedly won the episode with that one dish, a very difficult feat to do under tournament conditions.

Even better: he's a Chopped Grand Champion.

Giuseppe Gentile, who immigrated from Italy to the United States in hopes of a better life. He opened a humble pizza restaurant with no formal education in cooking. He went on to win in his debut episode with a perfect appetizer and dessert, and his entrée's only flaw was one slightly under-cooked ingredient he was not entirely familiar with.

Probably one of the most well known Crowning Moments was Madison Cowan absolutely demolishing the competition in his debut episode Crunch Time (which by the way also included the aforementioned Lance Nitahara), producing a completely flawless appetizer and a near flawless dessert. The biggest flaw he had the whole day was putting too many prunes on the plate in the entree round.

After that, he proceeds to go onto the first Chopped Champions tournament and win the whole thing, becoming the first Chopped Grand Champion.

It still doesn't stop there. After that, he goes onto Iron Chef America with his Sous Chefs being fellow Chopped competitor Lance Nitahara, and Chopped Judge Amanda Frietag in Battle Kale. And like the last two times, he wins.

TV Tropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from thestaff@tvtropes.org. Privacy Policy